More and more as of late I have been finding that I do most of my programming at work (as I should), and most of my reading at home.  At any given time I am reading 3 or 4 books, and trying to keep up with numerous blogs.  I have such a backlog of things I want to read that programming at home is often not an option.  Not to mention the fact that my family is growing (a 2 yr. old and another on the way).  So, I don’t hunch over at my keyboard into the wee hours of the morning like I used to.  So, when do you program?

Currently Reading

Just in case you are curious, I am currently reading:

• Code Complete 2nd Edition (Loving every minute of it)
• Pro JavaScript Techniques (Great book)
• Stephen King - Firestarter (Just finished Bag of Bones 2 nights ago)

On the way into work today I saw someone wearing a Yellow chicken suit in front of a Red Lobster restaurant.  In and of itself that isn’t much for news, however I almost went off the road when I saw the sign they were holding:

Top Frederick (as in Frederick, Maryland, USA) company looking for Senior Programmer …

I really, really wish I carried a camera in my car. How Senior is the person they are looking for I wonder? Senior in High School? I have a sense of humor, and this company was probably trying to appear casual and cool, but this just seems strange to me.

Tomorrow I’m having heart surgery!!  It’s really more of a procedure than a surgery, but it does involve doctors going into my heart and making some burns around my Pulmonary veins.  For 8 years now I have lived with Atrial Fibrillation, and tomorrow this procedure will hopefully be the start of a life without AF.  For me anyways, when I’m having an episode I get tired, winded, light headed, and weak.  I have found over the years that certain things tend to precipitate an episode, include: drinking beer (damn), staying up late (damn), unhealthy eating habits, drinking coffee before bed (damn), and allowing myself to get dehydrated.  Also, laying on my left side at night tends to cause problems.  When an episode does start it can last anywhere from 1 - 24 hours.  Just this morning I came off the tail end of a near 24 hour episode.  I only recently found out that exercise can cause my heart to go back into normal sinus rhythm.  So, a light jog/brisk walk this morning did the trick.

So, goodbye AF.  You have been a pain in my ass and you will not be missed.

Update: The surgery went well.  From what I’ve been told I was very hard to control on the operating table and had to be restrained.  At one point I sat up during the procedure and knocked my  head against one of the overhead devices.  There were 281 different burns made around my Pulmonary veins, and evidently I am a rarity, as I have 5 veins instead of the typical 4 (go me)!  I think the total time I was on the table was around 5 hours.  After my recovery period I was pretty sick due to the dose of anesthesia needed to keep me under.  Currenty I’m taking 5 different drugs, 2 of which are blood thinners.  I hate medication.  Lisa was awesome of course and is taking great care of me.  Her mom came into town to watch Cameron.  We’re so lucky to have her.  Anyway, my healing phase is 3 months, after which I hope to be drug free and free of AF.

How cool is this?  A tool to visualize the commit history of a software project.  The project in this case is the Eclipse IDE.

code_swarm - Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

IMG_0156

Originally uploaded by Family Leveille

My brother Corey is a k-9 officer with the Seattle Police Department in Seattle, Washington, USA. He’s been working with his dog for less than 6 months, and he says that they are getting along great. It stinks that he is all the way on the other side of the US, but things are going great for him so I am happy. We’re both traveling to Maine (born and raised in West Enfield, Maine) in a few weeks to hang out with family … and to have a few beers.

I’ve been trying for at least a month to make my Netvibes OPML file publicly available, and finally this morning I was successful. So, if you are at all interested in the feeds that I am interested in, you can visit my Netvibes public page.

http://www.netvibes.com/leveille

One of the first things I do in the morning and last things I do at night is run through my feed list to see if there is anything interesting.  If your feedlist is publicly available in one form or another, I would love to see what interests you.  Feel free to share.

It only took 6 months or so, but I have finally taken the time to get my old teaching site (http://my-classes.org) back online. When I was teaching I knew that a lot of people were visiting the site, specifically for the assignments that I had posted online. Believe me, teachers are always trying to find good lesson plans. After the 5th email this week regarding when the site would be back I finally broke down and found the time.

Thanks to my employer, Blue Atlas Interactive, for providing the hosting, not only for this blog, but now also for my-classes.org. Thanks to Dave for taking the time during work to get me the root shell password and my ftp information.

So, of all the comments you may have ever received on your blog, who provided the comment that made you say, “holy sheat, xxxx yyyyy just commented on my blog”? In early 2007 I was working with Jeff Brown of Jeff Brown Designs. We had recently launched his new site and Jeff had written a post on the use of CSS grids. Now, I know this doesn’t count for me, and Jeff is probably going to call me up and ask why the hell I stole Eric from him, but I’m writing about it anyway. The day of Jeff’s post who should place a comment on the blog? Eric Meyer himself. I felt all tingly and warm inside, and I had to breathe into a small paper bag to catch my breath. (more…)

Ok, so here it is. I originally had grand plans of launching the new blog powered by ExpressionEngine, however for various reasons I never got around to it. I always knew though that I could launch a WordPress blog in under 10 minutes. The downside is that I won’t be implementing my new design (thanks to Jon Weaver for his creative genious) until this summer.